


Where the Moon Says I Love You

by goldfinch



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/M, Families of Choice, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, a little Deutsch | German
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 02:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4204794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you met a girl, he wants to say to Felix, if you met a girl you really liked—but that’s where everything breaks down. How can he know if he loves Kala when they can live inside each other’s heads? He hasn’t really even met her. And that’s not even what matters, it’s not the most important part, but being in love with her feels too good to be true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where the Moon Says I Love You

“Felix.” His hands are soft and shaking, smoothing down Felix’s hospital gown, up the side of his neck. “Felix, hey, hey, _hier, schau mal da_.”

Felix’s eyes open. They look strange and unfocused at first; his hair’s a mess and he moves his tongue around in his mouth, like he’s tasting something there and is deciding how he likes it. “Wolfie,” he says, and then pauses. “ _Hat mich jemand mit Lakritze gefüttert_?”

Wolfgang nearly hits him. “ _Du Dummkopf_ ,” he says instead, grinning. “ _Du Arschloch_.”

The room is clean and quiet. There’s a little sun coming in through the windows, warming the back of one shoulder. Felix smiles. It’s not the same smile; this one’s tired and a little strained. But it’s there. There are small wounds still scattered across his chest where the doctors picked shotgun pellets from his skin, just visible through the low neck of his hospital gown. 

“ _Hast du dich gesorgt?_ ” he asks.

Wolfgang smiles a little. “ _Klar_.” He’s here, isn’t he?

“ _Wer—_ “

“ _Steiner_ ,” He pauses, looks down, looks up again. “ _Jetzt ist er tot. Mein Onkel auch_.”

“ _Scheisse_. Wolfie….”

“ _Ich weiss._ ” He drops his head back against the chair, slumps back. “ _Ich weiss. Sag's mir nicht._ ”

“ _Was bedeutet das? Für uns, meine ich_.”

Wolfgang shakes his head. What does it mean? He’s been thinking about very little else since he locked his hands around the wheel of an ambulance in Iceland; he hasn’t heard from anyone since then. Not even Kala. There hasn’t been anything else to do. “ _Keine Ahnung,_ ” he says.

Felix doesn’t say anything. He seems tired, drained, the way Wolfgang feels, as though someone’s taken his insides and wrung them out between their fists. The machines beep quietly. Wolfgang watches Felix’s heartbeat move up and down on the monitor. It’s steady now, and strong. Maybe that’s enough. He sits there until Felix’s eyes begin to close again, then he pushes himself out of the chair, touches his friend’s shoulder.

“ _Ich werde Morgen zurückkommen_ ,” he says. He’ll come every day, if he can, he’d sleep here if the nurses would let him. Felix is the only family he ever wanted. Felix is the only family he chose. Out of the whole mess of Wolfgang’s childhood Felix found him and pulled him up, and taught him courage, and no one made or led him to do that, not even Nature, or God; they were just two people who found each other and grabbed on. Conan the Barbarian movies and holding their breath until Wolfgang’s father passed out on the couch. Riding their bikes to the skatepark at night, when they were the only people there. Winning fights, for the first time in years.

“Hey, Wolfie.”

Wolfgang pauses, half in, half out of the doorway.

“Have you crushed your enemies?” Felix asks.

“Our enemies. _Ja._ And I have seen them driven before me, and heard the lamentations of their women.”

“ _Gut. Gut,_ ” Felix murmurs, and then his eyes slip closed again, and Wolfgang closes the door so quietly even he, with his safe-cracker’s ears, can hardly hear it.

 

 

 

 

You can't run from something that lives in your head. So he stays. He inherits an empire. His uncle has runners, dealers, muscle, fences, firepower, and a hard drive full of information; Wolfgang takes it all. It’s difficult work, at first, all that paperwork, the vast bureaucracy and logistics of running a crew—even a small one. Even a criminal one. But Felix helps, once he gets out of the hospital. And, too, there’s—

“Two men,” Sun says.

Wolfgang starts. She’s leaning easily against the side of his desk, arms crossed, mouth firm, a face that gives away nothing. It’s the first time he’s seen any of them since Iceland, since he watched the sun go down over the Atlantic, Riley humming lullabies under her breath. It wasn’t a deliberate withdrawal, just something that happened. Before he even opens his mouth to ask, she’s speaking again.

“Will is still unconscious,” she says, “but they have reached New York. If you ask me this is a bad strategy, and untenable in the long term, but it is the only option we have at the moment. Perhaps we will think of something better. In the meantime, you should have two men go only. Enough to pressure, but not enough to threaten.”

Wolfgang shakes his head. Shakes off Iceland, shakes off Kala’s face in the golden light. Sun’s expression doesn’t change, but she’s watching him. “I _want_ to threaten them,” he says.

“Then that is another matter altogether.” She leans over his shoulder, scans his charts. He can smell concrete and metal; he can taste _hyeonmi cha_ on his tongue. “In that case,” she says, “how many men do you have?”

It’s easier, with her. It’s so terribly easy with all of them, but Sun borrows his reckless determination and he borrows her strength of will and together they make something that feels halfway healthy. There’s a reason he never got involved with women: it was too easy to drag them into something they hadn’t asked for, and dangerous, too, if he developed feelings for them. Felix is always making that mistake, but he makes it so often it’s stopped meaning anything. Sun can face his life without flinching, because her hands are as bloody as his own, but Kala….

Sun’s head turns, very slightly, but when Wolfgang opens his mouth to justify himself nothing comes out. He doesn’t say anything.

Sun turns back toward the papers.

Of course her advice is good. Wolfgang gets the money, and the respect; his new life crystallizes around him like a cocoon. The Russians don’t give him stars, but they begin to trust him. His first contact is a thin, balding man with a mouth like something dragged across a field in the dark, a Russian national, tattoos curling gently against his face in alien black script. His body has been taken over. Wolfgang looks at the tattoos until the man threatens to carve some into Wolfgang’s skin with a paring knife, and after that he keeps his eyes up.

 

 

 

 

“ _Ich brauche mehr Stauraum,_ Wolfie,” Felix says one afternoon. “ _Ich hab so viele neue Paar Schue_.” He kicks out his feet. His newest pair is fluorescent yellow with white laces. Club shoes. Wolfgang has been buying other things with the money. Guns, and body armor—he’s learned that lesson well—grenades and ammunition and the numbers of mercenaries who can be at his side in five minutes. Protection. He’s trying to think of everything. They day Felix got out of the hospital Wolfgang gave him a bulletproof vest, and Felix rolled his eyes, but took it. They both know better now. Everyone who wanted Wolfgang specifically is dead, but there is always Whispers, and the cluster’s anxiety bleeds through, making him paranoid. Felix doesn’t question it. It must seem perfectly reasonable to him, after everything that’s happened.

Wolfgang looks down at his own black desert boots. They’re the shoes he bought after they sold the first half of the diamonds. He never recovered the other half from the wreckage, or even bothered looking for them. It had seemed a little pointless, after everything that happened, a remnant of a life he was trying to put behind him.

Sun’s words, his sentiment: I would like to believe that the past is done with us as soon as we are done with it.

But Wolfgang knows by now that isn’t true.

If you met a girl, he wants to say to Felix, if you met a girl you really liked—but that’s where everything breaks down. How can he know if he loves her when they can live inside each other’s heads? He hasn’t really even met her. And that’s not even what matters, it’s not the most important part, but being in love with Kala feels too good to be true. If he allowed himself to love her, he would lose everything else, like some Matrix illusion of happiness.

From the chair across from him, Felix shifts his leg, nudges Wolfgang’s ankle with one fluorescent-shoed toe. “Hey. _Was ist bloss mit dir los?_ ” Wolfgang doesn’t answer. “ _Das Geld?_ ” Another pause. When he speaks again his voice is very serious. “Wolfie, wealth can be wonderful. But you know, success can test one's mettle as surely as the strongest adversary.”

Wolfgang holds his gaze a full three seconds before they both burst out laughing.

 

 

 

 

The sky lightens from black to dark blue to pigeon-grey, and the deep rumble of the subway starts up at five, along with the frantic squabbling of the sparrows. Doors open and close. There is an ache behind Wolfgang's eyes, a weight like fishing lures, but if he sleeps he'll dream of her.

But if he's awake, she can come to him. He kicks his shoes off at the end of the bed, then his jeans and his jacket. He hesitates at the bulletproof vest, but eventually takes that off, too. If they get into the house without tripping the alarms then he’s already dead, and they’re more sophisticated than anyone realized.

He doesn’t dream about Kala, though, or about any of the other sensates. His dreams are swirling, confused things, impressions and colors, running down hallways for planes he knows he’ll never make, crossing bridges in places he has never seen, not even through someone else’s eyes. In the morning, he goes back to work. His uncle and Steiner dealt mostly in theft and arms trading, and whatever intimidation business the Russians sent his way. Wolfgang’s deal is mostly the same, except he’s handling more arms trade than his uncle ever did. The Russians like that.

“The mafia,” Sun says, “you should be careful of them. Criminals make bad business partners.”

“I grew up in this life. No one ever taught me to be careful. Besides,” he says, casting her a narrow, slanted glance, “I’m a criminal too, or did you forget already?”

The light pouring through the window is golden against the side of her face. “I have not forgotten. But I don’t trust your Russians. Not the way I trust you.”

“You only trust me because I’m inside your head.”

She inclines her head a little, in acknowledgement, if not agreement, then goes back to the papers spread over Wolfgang’s desk. Her help has been invaluable, and he knows that even if she doesn’t quite approve of what he’s doing, she likes helping him more than she likes helping Riley drag Will cross-country. And he’s grateful. Even if he’s never said it, he thinks she knows, but—

“Your brother,” he says, testing it out. 

Sun’s attention is lofty and immediate. “Yes?”

“Obviously I don’t have any pull in South Korea myself, but I’m sure I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who can put the fear of God into him.”

Sun looks at him. He can’t read her at all. She keeps herself so tightly contained that even during those times they shared a body, flickering in and out of Will, of Riley like a flame passed from candle to candle, he didn’t know her mind. She is as calm and still as lake water, as angry and powerful as the sea. “I would rather put a fear of me into him,” she says, and smiles, very slightly. “A confession would also be very helpful.”

He shrugs. “I mean, it’s not going to be _legal_ , obviously—“

She waves a dismissive hand. “It is business. Even legal business is very often gray. And this sort of business, family business, is even grayer.”

And isn’t that the truth.

 

 

 

 

 

The world is bright. There is too much color. The ceiling is not his ceiling; the walls are not his walls; the city outside the window is not Berlin and there, standing in front of the vanity with one hand over her mouth, is the only woman he has ever really loved. His love for her had been instant, like being struck by lightning, and it will burn him from the inside out too if he lets it.

“Wolfgang,” Kala says. It occurs to him, suddenly, that this is the first time she has ever said his name. “You’re—are you—what are you doing here?” She’s trying for anger, and for a moment she even manages it.

He raises himself up on his elbows. “I didn’t mean to come. I’ve just woken up.”

“Well—well get out of here. Go. Shoo!”

He levels a look at her, flat and unimpressed-feeling. “I’m trying.” But it’s like trying to unsnap a rubber band. It can’t be done. He can feel the warm curl of her consciousness at the back of his skull, her anger and pain and love, and he can’t dig it out again now that it’s there, no matter how much he wants to. “You think I want to be here? You think I want to be a part of any of this?”

She shakes her head. “We don’t have a choice. This is who we are now.”

“And all my life, the world has decided things for me. Who my father was, what part of the city I was from, my inability to fight. When I was eleven—when I met Felix—I started to make my own choices. Everything good in my life I have had to make happen, do you understand?”

Kala doesn’t look away. The sun catches and glows in the wild ends of her hair and she is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. “My parents are wonderful people,” she says. “Should I love them less because I didn’t choose to be born to them?”

“Of course not. But I don’t trust this—this thing, between us. Not when it’s love. It became love too easily. I told you; I wanted you the moment I saw you, and it wasn’t just physical—and that _doesn’t happen_. It’s not who I am. I’m losing control over myself, over my own body, my thoughts; they’re becoming someone else’s. I don’t feel comforted; I feel hunted. All of you there, in my head, all the time, I have to drag you behind me like shadows I can’t get rid of.”

“Wolfgang… we can help you through it. _I_ can help you through it.”

“ _You_ are part of the problem,” Wolfgang snaps. And then breathes, tries to calm himself. Sun’s breath, moving through his body. “Nomi told Lito once that the worst violence is the violence we do to ourselves, when we keep ourselves from becoming the people we truly are. Just the fact that I know that is—and the person I am is—“ he makes a cut-off gesture behind him, at the room, the paperwork, the gun lying disassembled on the desk. “This is who I was meant to be. And more important, it’s who I _want_ to be. I want to crush my enemies, and see them driven before me. I want to hear the lamentations of their women.”

She flinches back, at the last part, her beautiful face twisted into a by-now-familiar expression. It’s the face she wears when he has caused her pain. But of course she doesn’t understand, just as Will hadn’t understood. It comforts him to know that he can still keep secrets, even when there are seven other people inside his head. Kala looks away, around his room.

“All this won’t protect you, you know,” she says, gesturing at the camera in the corner, at the boxes full of guns. Her face is calm again, and sad. “What you say you are, it won’t help you. Whispers can get inside Will’s head, so he can get to all of us.”

“And it was his own fucking fault. Whispers isn’t going to get to me.” These days he sleeps with a handgun under his pillow, with the safety on but the chamber loaded. His nightstand drawer is full of grenades. Once it had been a struggle getting his hands on a rocket-launcher; now he drives around with two in the trunk of his car. He’s looking Kala in the eye and watches his knowledge pass into her, watches her eyes widen, her lips part, her face come open.

“Is Whispers really the one you’re protecting yourself from?” she asks.

He feels his teeth clench together, a muscle tick in his jaw. She made a bomb with the contents of a kitchen cupboard but her words are almost more dangerous. Gravity, he thinks, is the most predictable thing in the world, even if you can’t explain it.

 

 

 

 

 

“ _Na_ ,” Felix says. So. 

They’re sitting in Wolfgang’s living room, now more an office than anything else, sunlight slanting in through the gaps in the Rolladen over the window. A bottle of Weissbier sweats in Wolfgang’s hand, cold and cloudy through the brown glass. “ _Na_ ,” he says, and drinks.

“ _Was jetzt?_ ”

“ _Weiss ich nicht._ ” He tilts the bottle, studies the label for a moment. Weissbier isn’t his favorite. He prefers the craft stuff, the summer festivals, where he and Felix get wasted and ride black on the U-Bahn, falling over the seats, singing on the station escalators. He misses when things were simple. The gun lies still and silent on his desk, untraceable now that the serial number’s been filed off. He could use it today if he wanted. He could keep using it forever. But does he want to? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. His words to Felix echo back in his head, on loop, an answer to a question no one ever asked, an answer that is not an answer, that does not help, that solves nothing.

“Wolfie… _Alles in Ordnung?_ ” Felix leans forward. His voice is careful, his face lowered into soft shadow from the lamplight. It’s different from the last time he asked; there won’t be any laughter this time, because Wolfgang can’t muster up the willpower to lie. He can just see the raw pink mark of a shotgun pellet scar through Felix’s v-neck. If he reached out, the skin there would be smooth and strange under his fingers.

“ _Nein,_ ” he says, finally, and shakes his head, sets his beer down on the floor and puts his hands into his hair instead. No, he’s not okay. And he doesn’t know how to fix it, either.

**Author's Note:**

> German translations:
> 
>  _hier, schau mal da._ \- here, look here.
> 
>  _Hat mich jemand mit Lakritze gefüttert?_ \- Has someone fed me licorice?
> 
>  _Du Dummkopf. Du Arschloch._ \- You idiot. You asshole. 
> 
> _Hast du dich gesorgt?_ \- Were you worried?
> 
>  _Klar_ \- Obviously.  
>     
>  _Wer_ \- Who
> 
>  _Jetzt ist er tot. Mein Onkel auch._ \- Now he's dead. My uncle too.
> 
>  _Scheisse_ \- Shit  
>     
>  _Ich weiss. Ich weiss, sag's mir nicht._ \- I know. I know, don't tell me.
> 
>  _Was bedeutet das? Für uns, meine ich_ \- What does that mean? For us, I mean.
> 
>  _Keine Ahnung_ \- No idea.
> 
>  _Ich werde Morgen zurückkommen_ \- I'll come back tomorrow.
> 
>  _Ja_ \- Yes.
> 
>  _Ich brauche mehr Stauraum. Ich hab so viele neue Paar Schue._ \- I need more storage space. I've got so many new pairs of shoes.
> 
>  _Was ist bloss mit dir los?_ \- What's up with you?
> 
>  _Das Geld?_ \- The money?
> 
>  _Gut_ \- Good.
> 
>  _Na._ \- So.
> 
>  _Was jetzt?_ \- What now?
> 
>  _Alles in Ordnung?_ \- Everything alright?
> 
> Please note: German isn't my first language; I tried to keep to things I knew I knew how to say, but if I've fucked up the grammar anywhere please let me know ; ) I was so frustrated characters didn't speak their native languages on the show, I had to fix it here, at least.


End file.
